HOW TO PREVENT THIEVES
FROM STEALING YOUR PRODUCT

A Number of Possible Solutions

PROTECTING YOUR DOWNLOAD LINKS

   Once you have your ebook in a place on the Internet (not just your hard drive) where it can be downloaded, you need to make sure it is hidden from hackers and thieves. Too often, someone will download something and immediately share it (free of course) with their friends, their kids, their classmates, their co-workers, their neighbors, etc., etc.

   Now if you're just giving your ebook away (this is called "viral marketing") that's OK. In fact, you want to encourage it, but if you're trying to sell it, that's a bad! Just ask the music companies who are being ripped off by people illegally passing around their MP3 files.

   When you visit a webpage you will see, up at the top left, the address of that page - something like

http://www.bobtheteacher.com/prefers/LinkGenerator/

   If you see something like this:

http://www.bobtheteacher.com/prefers/LinkGenerator/download/don't-steal-this-book.pdf

then you are in the vault and can easily copy that line and share it with friends ... and guess what, they have a free pass to the ebook you've sweated over and are depending on to put the kids through college. By the way, the top link is real, but the bottom one is imaginary andd won't get you anywhere).

   What you need to do is hide that address. You want people to be able to GET the product - after they've paid for it, of course - but not necessarily see exactly where it came from.

   One way is to put your ebook in a password-protected folder, so the buyer has to have a password to get to it. Problem with that is, they can also get everything else that's in that folder, so you want to be choosy about what you put there or you may be giving away the whole store.

  Another way is to set up a protected area just for members - free or paid, or even one for each. All members with access to that folder have one User ID and one Password. Anyone with that ID and Password can get into that folder and download anything they find. That's OK if (a) you have enough products to justify a membership approach and (b) if you have a way of monitoring who goes in so if someone is cheating you can cut them off. Also, you can change the ID and Password every month and send an email to all your existing members. I know of one ebook seller, Ian Traynor, who does this.

   Yet another way is to use what's called "link cloaking" code in your web pages, so they never see that web page address.

   Yet another is to use an online service where you can store your files and THEY protect them from thieves. Payloadz is a good one. They, too, offer a free file hosting solution for small users.

   There's also a simple way that involves protecting your download page. Let's look at a real example. I used one of the free tools on Bravenet.com (you can protect up to 50 pages for free) to protect our sample download page for the Iridology book. Someone trying to open this page has to first go through Bravenet, where the ID and Password are stored.

USER ID = Joe - PASSWORD = Blow